Toni Denmark was chatting with family and friends in her Novato home when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which had just occurred, came up. The polite conversation quickly became heated as various viewpoints began flying like stray bullets, she says.

“It was like a microcosm of the nation and very scary,” she says. “There just seemed there was no way to resolve it. There were so many valid points, how can you just discount some of them? These people are rational people.”

To learn more, Denmark began devouring newspaper articles on gun violence here and abroad. But it just left her with a deep sorrow and conflicted feelings about the country she came to from Croatia when she was just 10 years old.

So, she started painting.

“It’s the tool I have. I’m past the stage where I’m going to go out picketing about things or a more aggressive action,” she says. “I paint my passions, which is dancing and shoes. This, too, is a passion, but it’s a negative passion.”

Her painting, “Dialogue,” which features an American flag superimposed over newspaper clippings about guns and “bleeding” from its red stripes as well as quotes pulled from newspaper articles, is a fitting example of how the news not only informs, but also fires imagination. It’s among the many paintings inspired by Marin IJ articles that will be on display, along with the articles, in the upcoming juried exhibit “Artists’ View of the News” at the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross.

It’s the first time the Marin Society of Artists has asked artists to paint from the news, a suggestion by board member Sue Lyttle, who participated in a similar exhibit in 2008 with Allied Artists West at San Jose State University’s King Library.

“The library said it was one of the most interesting exhibits the library had,” the Novato resident says. “The artists thought this was one of the most fun assignments.”

For this exhibit, Lyttle was inspired by an IJ article on salmon fishing.

“I grew up salmon fishing and I’ve eaten a lot of salmon and I don’t want them to go away,” she says.

“I’m trying to convey some kind of feeling and hang on to that. There’s so much in the news that evokes those feelings. You can’t help but be affected by it, and everything around you affects your art,” Smith Myer says.

That’s why Meg Reilly’s painting is titled “Gulf of the Farallones.” An avid marine environmentalist and swimmer — she’s been swimming in the bay from San Francisco’s Dolphin Club for more than 20 years — Reilly was overjoyed that the federal government recently expanded protections around the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine fisheries.

It was a new way for her to think about the news, too, she says.

“I would start to think visually, whatever the piece of news is, what does that look like? What does this catalyze for me?” the Novato resident says. “The news is the written word. What I was translating it into was, how does that become visually interpreted?”

An exhibit like this is an important one, she believes.

“When people respond to your work, they have a visceral reaction, kind of a ‘Wow,’ and then they start to talk about what they see,” says Reilly, who was a member of the Port of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf Waterfront Advisory Committee for many years and an attorney for the Nature Conservancy. “I hope it inspires them to a greater consciousness to what’s happening to our environment and what we can do to help.”

So does Lyttle.

“Just as the newspaper is one way to bring social issues into consciousness, the visual arts can augment or add to that,” she says.

Denmark, who left Croatia with her family for political reasons and lived in a refugee camp for a year, would hope an exhibit such as this inspires more than just consciousness and talk.

“I wish people would get informed and act. This is our world; if we don’t do something about it, we lose it,” Denmark says.

Vicki Larson is an author and has been an award-winning lifestyles editor, writer and columnist at the IJ since 2004. She has worked as an editor in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Walnut Creek, San Francisco, Napa and Miami.